• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 1, 2011

Paul Malmont is having altogether too much boyish fun. He not only writes pulp-like adventure tales, he writes pulp-like adventure tales about the greats who used to write pulp adventure. And in life, he has a dual identity that is something like the pulp heroes of old. And now, Malmont is promoting his new novel with a literary trailer sending up his own marketing profession.

By day, Malmont works in the ad trade, as an Associate Creative director at R/GA, according to his latest LinkedIn listing. By night he dons the garb of bestselling novelist, the author several years ago of his breakthrough first effort, The Chinese Death Cloud Peril and now of The Astounding, The Amazing and the Unknown. His schtick is to put real-like adventure authors like Jack London, L. Ron Hubbard and Lester Dent themselves into rip-snorting, page-turning tales that have the pace, wild villains and intrigue of the great pulp stories of the 30s and 40s.

As someone who has read around in his novels (in the middle of both Chinatown and Amazing simultaneously) and spent many hours reading through Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider and the great era of magazine fiction, I heartily endorse his work. He knows his source material very well but has a great knack for affecting a more modern sensibility than the form he is honoring. Even in the age of the deft thriller by writers like Daniel Silva and Jeffrey Deaver, an action page-turner (where you really want to see what happens next) is rare these days.

The Astounding, The Amazing and the Unknown brings together in a WWII Philadelphia base sci-fi greats L. Sprague De Camp, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and eventually L. Ron Hubbard to investigate a secret project by Nikolai Tesla they hope to use against the Nazis. A worldwide hunt ensues.

Of course you would expect someone who is working in creative at a major ad agency to come up with an imaginative trailer.  Arguably, many writers we have seen depicted in trailers seem to bristle at this new online video form of self-promotion. And we are sympathetic. A book trailer is now de rigeur in the book publishing industry, and we still haven't seen any evidence that they have a demonstrable effect on a book's visibility or sales. When we happen upon many of them at YouTube, their video view counts are sadly low. So a reticent author is forgiven his or her skepticism.

But Malmont embraces the creative challenge. In the very funny clip for his new book he goes meta and interviews marketers pitching him ideas for marketing the novel. And so we get a compendium of marketing industry tropes: from the jargon-laden mobile maven to the self-important marketer-as-star who is only interested in producing "hits." Just as in his fiction about pulp writer that is borne from a life of reading the genre, Malmont himself clearly has been in his fair share of weird pitch meetings. Don't miss the extended clips of two of the pitches, the T-Shirt spot and the experience artist doing an interpretive dance for a Nazi-hunting adventure. "It's a flash mob," they claim. Like his novels, this trailer has the troubling air of truth to it.